Trump’s Unenthusiastic Voter Trap

The Democrats’ summer of joy is gone. It has passed into the autumn of apprehension, as the polling suggests the presidential race has reverted to a state of near equilibrium and frustrating unpredictability.

And yet, national surveys do not suggest that Harris is losing steam precisely. Rather, Donald Trump is regaining some of the ground he lost amid the national euphoria that followed Joe Biden’s overdue exit from the political stage. The race is virtually tied at the national level. And because so many Democratic votes are located in densely populated urban centers on America’s dark-blue coasts, a tie yields an Electoral College advantage to the GOP. For now, it looks like Donald Trump may be back in the catbird seat.

And yet, that could prove illusory. On Tuesday, New York Times analyst Nate Cohn provided a note of caution for the Trump camp and its supporters:

Cohn is right. In a head-to-head matchup, the latest Times/Siena poll found 49 percent of respondents who self-report not voting in 2020 backed Trump, and voters with a profile that suggests Democratic leanings are slightly more likely to say they are “certain” to vote. Likewise, a newly published NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that, while Harris’s vote share has declined from August, 85 percent of Harris’s voters describe themselves as “definitely” voting compared to Trump’s 82 percent. Eighty-three percent of Trump’s core demographic, whites without a college degree, say they’re likely to vote compared with 94 percent of degree-holders — a subset of voters who lean toward Harris. In NPR/PBS News/Marist’s August poll, 87 percent of Trump voters described themselves as “definitely voting,” and the same percentage of non-college white voters expressed enthusiasm for the November election.

Trump has always struggled with the fact that a make-or-break share of his potential voters needs a lot of prodding to actually cast a ballot. But that’s not Trump’s challenge alone. Pollsters struggle (understandably) to model an electorate that exists only in theory before the votes are cast. Whether it’s weighting responses to compensate for a deficit of respondents among would-be Trump voters, adjusting sampling methodology to forecast the mix of race, gender, and educational backgrounds, or just taking the data at face value, individual pollsters have their own secret sauce to account for the fact that a certain number of unlikely voters will vote in November. The only outstanding question is, how many?

Obviously, Donald Trump needs to juice the turnout among low-propensity voters. His campaign’s efforts to target, for example, young men by adapting Barack Obama’s 2012 strategy by shunning the traditional press in favor of unconventional, apolitical media venues provide observers with clues about what the former president’s advisers think a winning electorate will look like. But overinvesting in unlikely voters creates pitfalls into which the Trump camp could careen if its not careful.

Courting the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vote is one. Kennedy’s outsider status and his willingness to challenge consensus appeal to disaffected voters in ways conventional candidates backed by establishmentarian institutions cannot. But (pace, denizens of the internet) Kennedy’s outsider status is well-deserved. There are rewards as well as risks available to the candidate who fully embraces a guy who insists Wi-Fi signals cause “leaky brain,” chemicals deliberately introduced into the water supply are making children gender fluid, and Covid was genetically engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews.

Likewise, the Trump campaign’s attachment to the notion that Tucker Carlson is a net asset seems rooted in the presumption that his appeal to the voters they need is greater than his power to repulse other crucial constituencies. Sought-after Washington D.C.-based political consultants might disagree, but it seems intuitive that it does not benefit the Trump campaign to get bogged down in a historically revisionist debate over whether Hitler was simply misunderstood. By staging joint appearances between Carlson and J. D. Vance even after the former Fox News host’s latest lapse in judgment, the Trump camp risks alienating voters on the margins. And the margins are all that matter in a race as close as this one.

“Microtargeting” — tailoring specific messages to a narrow set of voters — is no longer feasible. Everything is broadcast now. Any effort to appeal to the most far-out Kennedy and Carlson supporters will be heard by constituencies that are far less comfortable with their crackpottery. Leaning too hard into the kook vote can energize the unenthused just as much as it might depress the formerly engaged.

There are other, safer avenues available to the Trump campaign if it sets its sights on apathetic voters. For now, however, the former president’s team seems convinced that being maximally provocative is the pathway to success. They should be more worried about whom they’re provoking.